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Hitting the Holy Road

Reviewed by Chris Skilton.

Stuart Coulton is Vice principal and lecturer in Church History at Sydney Missionary and Bible College and has produced “A guided tour of Christian history from the early church to the Reformation”. Each of the sixteen chapters follows a common structure – an introduction to a specific location deeply associated with the period covered by the chapter; the story of the church –the key people, events and ideas of the time; and finally a reflection on the lessons that can be learned from the history for the church today.

I would have settled for a book that skipped the first and last sections and concentrated on the middle. The good first! The book takes the history of the church seriously and fewer and fewer Christians do so today. To know and understand where the church has come from and what it has lived and worked though is important for shaping and forming the church of the present – and if more are introduced to church history through this book, that is all to the good. It is written in an easy and accessible style, well-planned and mapped out.  The overview is inevitably selective – Thomas Aquinas merits only 16 lines; there is an unremittingly dim view taken of the medieval papacy and it doesn’t really explain why; having said that it covered the Reformation, it stops abruptly with Luther (no Zwingli, Calvin or English Reformers).

And the outer wrappings? The first sections have the feel of a travel guide, and whilst it’s good to locate events in their place and setting, we didn’t need to know about the tourist trade in Ephesus today or why Cluny is disappointing for the modern visitor. It would have been far more interesting to have approached the sites as a pilgrim rather than a tourist. The final reflections attempt to draw a moral lesson from the history and verge on a ‘thought for the day’. It would have been better to have let the history speak for itself.

There is a comprehensive bibliography, but as an introduction to history it would have been better placed at the end of each chapter as ‘further reading’. I am sure that it will have kept the cost down, but blurred black and white pictures of historical sites won’t suffice these days.